Google has said that it would pulling the plug on seven projects as its chief executive Larry Page moves to focus on fewer and more promising projects.
Announced on its corporate blog, the plans represent its third "spring cleaning" announcement since its co-founder Page took over in April. A "Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal" initiative launched to bring down the cost of generating solar power was listed among the Google initiatives being shelved.
The other projects included that were being dropped included Google Knol, Google Search Timeline, Google Gear, Google Friend Connect, Google Bookmarks Lists and Google Wave.
Google operations senior vice president Urs Holzle said in a blog post that they were in the process of shutting down a number of products which haven’t had the impact they had hoped for.
Holzle said, "We’ve published our results to help others in the field continue to advance the state of power tower technology, and we’ve closed our efforts." He added, "At this point, other institutions are better positioned than Google to take this research to the next level."
This has been necessitated as Google is facing tough competition from Apple and Facebook in the arenas of mobile computing and social networking.
